You can troubleshoot JavaScript in Teams using the web based version of teams via: https://teams.microsoft.com

If you're building a configuration tab and get the following message:

We couldn't save your tab settings.

You can bring up F12 Developer Tools to see what's going on and even debug your JavaScript eg:

Clicking on the configuration.htm you can see I've forgotten to use the SSL ngrok endpoints - which was the cause of this error.  This is a prerequisite referenced here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/concepts/tabs/tabs-configuration

After you upgrade Dynamics 365 organizations to Dynamics 365 (online), version 9.0, please also make sure to upgrade the existing Field Service and Project Service Automation solution to the latest and greatest version; this ensures functionalities work as expected and allows you to try out new capabilities introduced in the new release.

To update to the latest Field Service, Project Service solution, visit the Admin Center for Dynamics 365 online, and head to the solutions page to install the update. For details, refer How to Install, Update a Preferred Solution

Known Issues for Field Service v6.2.x on Dynamics 365 9.0 Orgs

Web client

• Issue with Geocode functionality on workorder/account/contact entities after selecting an address from address suggestor
• Schedule Board doesn’t auto-refresh when changes are made to a booking; users must select refresh option
• Issue with creating Quote Service-based/Order Service-based line, as “Save” is not visible on the quick create form
• Cannot create opportunity line (service-based line)

Devices (using Dynamics 365 App from store)

• No apps will be available when user with FS resource role logs in
• “Field Resource Hub” app is not available if user with System Administrator security role logs in

Known Issues for Project Service Automation v1.2.x on Dynamics 365 9.0 Orgs

Web client

• User cannot confirm project contract
• Cannot to add project-based quote line and contract line
• Cannot create project/project template

Known Issues for Field Service v6.0.x on Dynamics 365 9.0 Orgs

Web client

• Booking details are not available from the “Details” tab

Devices (using Field Service app)

• Intermittent app crashes
• Intermittent error popup "Arg_NullReferenceException" while creating work order in Windows 10 tablet

Devices (using Dynamics 365 App from store)

• Permissions issue when a user with Field Service resource role logs in
• No apps will be available when user with System Administrator security role logs in

Known Issues for Project Service Automation v1.0.x on Dynamics 365 9.0 Orgs

Web client

• Cannot confirm project contract
• Cannot add project-based quote line
• Cannot create quote from opportunity. similarly, quote cannot be created from opportunity form using “+”
• Cannot add project-based opportunity line
• Cannot create booking/task

For more information:

• Scheduling Your Dynamics 365 Organization for Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online) version 9.0 Update
• Release Notes for Field Service and Project Service Automation Update 3
• Release Notes for Field Service and Project Service Automation Update 2
• Release Notes for Field Service and Project Service Automation Update 1
• What's new in Dynamics 365 for Field Service and Project Service Automation
• Dynamics 365 for Field Service - User's Guide
• Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation - User's Guide

Feifei Qiu

Program Manager

Dynamics 365, Field Project Service Team

Here are top stories we found in our streams this week related to DevOps, VSTS, TFS and other interesting topics.

TOP STORIES

• Post 2- Value Stream Mapping for ALM Ranger’s VSTS Extensions Work Stream - Hamid Shahid
  In my last blog post, I wrote about benefits of Value Stream Mapping (VSM) in the realm of software development. I also wrote about how we, the ALM | DevOps Rangers, plan to use it in our VSTS Extensions work stream - which is today's story.
• VSTS Gems- Identify stale branches - Shmulik Ahituv
  Maintaining a clean repository when there are many branches and contributors
• Announcing the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) Solution Template - Justyna Lucznik
  Blue Margin, Inc., Microsoft Gold Partner in Data Analytics and Data Platform just released a VSTS solution template to provide project managers the insights they need to manage their portfolios. The VSTS Solution Template is an end-to-end data-management and business-intelligence solution that can be set up in just a few clicks.
• Test Automation Benefits - Spring In To Action - Jane Kelly
  As we rapidly approach the new spring season with vigour, there's never a better time to revisit areas in our work/home lives and look at applying a fresh approach to make improvements.
• Setting up 2 factor authentication and email verification with .net core 2.0 - Gordon Beeming
  Today I played with a new .net core template just to see what the authentication options were out the box and was surprised to see just how easy it is to go from nothing to having a base project that has authentication fully baked in with 2 factor authentication and email verification.
• Upcoming Speaking Engagements - Mickey Gousset
  I’ve updated the Speaking page on my blog for some of my upcoming engagements. I’m thrilled to be speaking at three new venues this spring that I have not spoken at before.
• A quick look at the new SonarQube tasks for TFS and VSTS - Matteo Emili
  Last week SonarSource released a new version of their tasks for TFS and VSTS, with a couple of very welcome additions.
• Goats up high - Brian Harry
  

DEVOPS LINKS

• Have you bookmarked these DevOps focused aka.ms links?

• aka.ms/devops - DevOps at Microsoft
• aka.ms/devopslab - The DevOps Lab
• aka.ms/devopslabs - Microsoft Visual Studio DevOps Hands-On-Labs
• aka.ms/devopsarticles - Technical Articles

TIP: If you want to get your VSTS news in audio form then be sure to subscribe to RadioTFS .

FEEDBACK

What do you think? How could we do this series better?
Here are some ways to connect with us:

• Add a comment below
• Use the #VSTS hashtag if you have articles you would like to see included

The following post about managing risks in modern software development is from Premier Developer consultant, Assaf Stone.

No offense, but despite your best intentions, you might not be handling risk properly. In this day and age, everything is software-dependent; even if you do not consider yourself a “software-firm” per-se, even if you are just running a small development team that develops in-house software, your business still depends on said software to run smoothly, and any outages cost money. The bigger the problem, the greater the cost. If you, like many other modern software-based organizations, try to reduce risk by taking every precaution to avoid the occurrence of failures, then I am talking to you. If you are (still) following the waterfall methodology (why would you do that???), then I am definitely talking to you.

In this blog post I will explain what is fundamentally wrong with the waterfall way of addressing risk, why you should resist the temptation to avoid failure, and what you should be doing instead, in order to truly reduce risk that is inherent to delivering software.

You can read more on Assaf’s post here.

Cost is always a concern with customers when it comes to the cloud. I've had a number of conversations with customers lately around how they can take advantage of various offers and benefits on Azure to reduce their costs, and I thought I'd share some of them here as well. There are many things you can do to optimize cost, some of which have some caveats and some which may take more effort than others, but this should give you some ideas of things to consider if you'd like a lower Azure bill (and who doesn't love lower bills). Let's take a look through some of the options available, which type of resources they apply to, and how to leverage them in your environment. Because compute costs are typically the largest driver of costs, much of the focus here is on Azure Virtual Machines.

Reserved Instances

We recently announced the general availability of reserved instances on Azure, and this was great to see come to fruition. For VM workloads that are static and predictable in nature, this is a fantastic offer that can save upwards of 70% depending on the VM size. For workloads that are up and running 24x7x365 and are unlikely to change in VM size this certainly an option that should be looked at. Reserved instances are purchased in 1 or 3 year terms, with payment required for the full term up front. Once purchased, we match up the reservation to running instances, and decrement the hours from your reservation. Reservations can be purchased through the Azure Portal and since reserved instances are a compute discount, they are available for both Windows and Linux VMs. For more information take a look at the following documentation.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/reserved-vm-instances/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/prepay-reserved-vm-instances

Azure Hybrid Benefit

For customers who have made an investment in Windows Server licenses the Azure Hybrid Benefit gives customers usage rights for Virtual Machines on Azure. When applied to vitrual machines in Azure, you will not be charged for the Windows Server license and will instead be billed at the Linux rate. To be eligible for this benefit, current Windows licenses must be covered by Software Assurance. Each 2-processor license or each set of 16-core licenses are entitled to two instances of up to 8 cores, or one instance of up to 16 cores. The Azure Hybrid Benefit for Standard Edition licenses can only be used once either on-premises or in Azure. Datacenter Edition benefits allow for simultaneous usage both on-premises and in Azure. Most customers are typically licened by core, so you'll use that model for your calculation. If you have questions about what licenses you have, you can reach out to your license reseller or your Microsoft account team to get more information. Applying this benefit is easy, and can be done at deployment time for new VMs and can be enabled or disabled at any time on existing VMs.

We have also announced plans to provide similar capabilities for SQL Server licenses, but have not yet made this fully available. I mention this so that you be on the look out for this availability in the near future.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/hybrid-benefit/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/hybrid-use-benefit-licensing

Enterprise Dev/Test or PAYG Dev/Test Subscription

The Enterprise Dev/Test and Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test offers are a benefit you can take advanatage of to save costs on your non-production environments. This benefit gives you several discounts, most notably for Windows workloads, charging you the Linux rate for virtual machines. This also applies to SQL Server, and any other Microsoft software that is covered under Visual Studio subscription (formerly known as MSDN). There are a few requirements for this benefit, one being that it's only for non-production workloads, and another being that any users of these environments (excluding testers) must be covered under Visual Studio subscription. In short, for non-production workloads, this allows you save money on your Windows, SQL Server and other Microsoft Virtual Machine workloads.

Below are the full details of each offer. If you are a customer on an Enterprise Agreement, you'd leverage the Enterprise Dev/Test offer, and if you a customer without an Enterprise Agreement and are instead using PAYG accounts, you'd leverage the Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test offer.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0148p/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0023p/

SQL Server Developer Edition

As of April 1, 2016, Microsoft has made SQL Server Developer Edition a free product for non-production use. This is yet another way you can save on Azure costs for your non-production environments. On the Azure Marketplace you can find SQL Server 2016 and SQL Server 2017 images for Developer Edition, which will eliminate the additional cost for SQL Server, and for previevious version you can provision a new Windows VM and download SQL Server Developer Edition from your Visual Studio Subscriber Downloads, provided you have a Visual Studio subscription. For full licensing infomration, take a look at the following links. Bottom line, for non-production workloads that use SQL Server you should look closely at taking advantage of this offer. One side note, there is no way to convert an existing SQL Server VM to another license type, you'll have to provision a new VM and migrate your databases to the new server.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-2017-pricing
https://download.microsoft.com/download/7/8/C/78CDF005-97C1-4129-926B-CE4A6FE92CF5/SQL_Server_2017_Licensing_guide.pdf
https://download.microsoft.com/download/B/C/0/BC0B2EA7-D99D-42FB-9439-2C56880CAFF4/SQL_Server_2017_Licensing_Datasheet.pdf

BYOL SQL Server Licenses

If you are a customer on an Enterprise Agreement and already have an investment in SQL Server licenses and they have freed up as part of moving resources to Azure, you can provision BYOL images off the Azure Marketplace, giving you the ability to take advantage of these unused licenses and reduce your Azure VM cost. You've always been able to do this by provisioning a Windows VM and manually installing SQL Server, but this simplifies the creation process by leveraging Microsoft certified images. Take a look at the following blog post from the initial announcement, and you'll find these marketplace images available for you today to take advantage of.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/easily-bring-your-sql-server-licenses-to-azure-vms/

Azure Cost Management (Cloudyn)

Last year Microsoft purchased Cloudyn and has since rebranded it Azure Cost Management. This is a free service that will anaylyze your Azure workloads and provide recommendations, such as right-sizing VMs and purchasing reserved instances. There's a whole host of features that give you the ability to evaluate, report and budget your Azure costs, so it's a great tool to take a look at to get an idea of where your money is going. For Azure services there is no charge for the service itself, and there is a paid tier if you need support and integration with other cloud providers. Definitely get this set up and leverage it to analyze your spend. Take a look at the following documentation for more details.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cost-management/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management/overview

Azure Advisor

Along with Azure Cost Management, Azure Advisor is another service to take a look at to identify areas of inefficiency. Azure Advisor evaluates your environment and provides recommendations on high availability, security, performance and cost. It's a good idea to pay attention to the recommendations as a whole, but specific to cost it will make recommendations around resizing or shutting down unused VMs, identifying where you might be able to take advantage of Azure SQL Elastic Pools, and unutilized ExpressRoute circuits that may be costing you money. Azure Cost Management will give you more details on your compute, but it's still a good practice to check Advisor regularly for all the recommendations it provides.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/advisor/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/advisor/advisor-overview

Right-Size/Shut Down/Deallocate VMs

One of the things that Cost Management and Advisor may recommend is right-sizing or shutting down VMs. Changing VM size is easy on Azure, and if you have VMs that typically sit idle, this is a great way you can reduce your costs. Shutting down unused systems is important as well, as often times VMs are created for a test environment or a project that maybe never took off, but nobody went back and cleaned up the environment afterwards. Identifying these systems is important, as they drive up your bill unnecessarily. It's also important to take a look at the usage patterns of your systems. If you have systems that are primarily used during business hours (or another regular time period) you should evaluate if you can shut them down when they are not being used. I've had customers succefully use Azure Automation to run scripts that will stop/start VMs on a schedule. Below are a couple examples of this (both of which are avialble in Azure Automatin), you can use these scripts or modify them as appropriate. Bottom line, it's important to evauluate the size, usage and usage patterns of your VMs to ensure they are as cost effective as possible.

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Scheduled-Virtual-Machine-2162ac63
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/ShutdownStart-VMs-by-tag-3f1e9afd

Use Visual Studio Subscrption (MSDN) Keys

If you have a Visual Studio subscription (formerly known as MSDN) you do have the ability to use the license keys on Azure Virtual Machines. There are some limitations to this, they can't be used on production systems, other users of these systems must also be covered under the appropriate VS license, and you can't use this benefit for the Windows Server or Windows client VM licenses, but for things like SQL Server this could be another way to reduce your VM costs. You could provision a BYOL image, enter a key from your VS subscription and eliminate the costs for SQL Server for that VM. Take a look through the following documentation for the specific requirements and limitations.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/licensing-faq/ (the last FAQ has details on this licensing)
https://www.visualstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Visual-Studio-2017-Licensing-Whitepaper-March-2017.pdf (page 14 specifically has more details)

Migrate to PaaS Services

Lastly, as you move workloads to the cloud, a natural evolution is to start with IaaS services and them move them to PaaS as appropriate, and in an iterative process. PaaS services typically provide a substantial savings in both resource and operational costs. The challenge is that, depending on the type of service, varying levels of effort will be required to move to these servcies from both a time and resource perspective. You may be able to easily move a SQL Server databse to Azure SQL DB, but it may take substantially more effort to move your multi-tier application to a container or serverless based architecture. It's a good practice to continuously evaluate the architecture of your applications to determine if there are efficiences to be gained through PaaS services. Azure makes it easy to test these out with little risk, giving you the ability to try out new architecture patterns relatively easily. That said, it's typically a longer journey and may not be of immediate help if you're looking for quick wins from a cost savings perspective. The Azure Architecture Center is a great place to get ideas for transforming your application, as well as best practices across a wide array of architectures and Azure services.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/

Wrap Up

Customers are always looking at how they can shave costs across their IT environments, and as I've detailed here, there's numerous ways you can drive lower costs throughout your Azure environments. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, so you'll need to evaluate your environments and leverage the capabilities that fit. Some are going to provide more benefit than others, and there may be some work to realign resources to take advantage of these, but they're definitely worth looking into further.

How can I import data from a .dbf (dBase) file into Power BI?

Today’s Power BI Mailbag Question comes from a friend who often works with geospatial data and, as a result, ends up with several different shapefile formats, including .dbf (dBase) database table files. There are several blog articles around shapefile mapping options in Power BI, but this question of accessing the .dbf file directly from Power BI was something I hadn’t been asked before.

Note: Power BI does not have native .dbf file support at the time of publishing this article, but the idea has been proposed at ideas.powerbi.com if you would like to vote for it. 

When I began searching for a solution, I found several threads in the .NET provider MSDN forum showing how to leverage the Access OLEDB provider (Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0) to import data from a .dbf file into SQL Server. With this, we can use a similar solution in Power BI. 

Data Source (Rainfall in Ethiopia):
For this example, I’m using a .dbf file containing the rain statistics in towns in Ethiopia from worldbank.org.

Steps:
In Power BI Desktop, click on Get Data -> Blank Query

Click on the Advanced Editor and replace the default text with the following text (replacing with your path and dBase file name):

let
    Source = OleDb.DataSource("Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=C:BlogDBF;extended properties=dBASE IV", [Query="select * from [rain.dbf]"])
in
    Source

This will prompt you to edit the credentials. Click "Edit Permissions" to continue.

Another prompt appears asking to approve of running the native query against this data source. Since the OLEDB provider syntax we provided contains the query string, you need to approve that this can be executed against the .dbf file. Click Run to continue.

You may get one additional dialog box requesting proper credentials as I did with some other data sources I used in testing this solution. I selected the “Default or Custom” option with no value supplied in the connection string property dialog. 

With this, the data will be loaded into Power BI and you can continue with your report creation.

Special thanks to Aaron Bator for constantly pushing the edges of Power BI and bringing new and innovative ideas and questions. Keep them coming!

Thanks,
Sam Lester (MSFT)

Abstract :

EDGE Extension:  Quick intro into the world of extensions. What is the need of extensions? Simple demo using the extension API’s and the roadmap of extension API’s for Edge browser.

Microsoft’s open-source SONAR tool: What is this tool all about, demo on how to use it as a command line utility. How to customize the rules to get results efficiently while scanning for the compatibility issues with the websites.

Webinar Date & Time:  March 9th 2018, 10 AM GMT

Invite: Download the Calendar Invite

Speaker Bio:

Apoorva Kakhandiki is part of Developer Tools and works as a Support Engineer. Her day to day work mostly relates with Internet Explorer and Edge browsers’ space. She is a dual skilled engineer with development and configuration expertise. She works directly with the customers helping them resolve application compatibility issues within the boundaries of the browsers. She has also  helped the team with developing Case Title Generator tool to manage the cases.

Abstract :

This is a Proxy oriented session, that starts with introduction to proxy servers. We will discuss about various configurations of proxy with reference to the browsers IE11 and Microsoft Edge. Focus would be mainly on tools such as "Winhttpdiag", "AutoProx" and "PAC-DBG", which helps us understand proxy set up and aid in troubleshooting. Thereby, simplifying the approach while handling issues with respect to Proxies.

Webinar Date & Time:  March 7th 2018, 8 AM GMT

Invite: Download the Calendar Invite

Speaker Bio:

Preethi Shekar currently works as a Support Engineer at Microsoft India GTSC. Her day to day role is to empower peers and customers to achieve more. Her role creates an opportunity to master the basics of various technical concepts. Being in a customer facing role, she partners with product groups and collaborates with divergent teams. Her focus areas are browser architecture, group policies, windows networking and technical concepts relating to Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge.

Abstract :

This session would shed some light on the tools which are used by our Support Engineers on daily basis. It has always been a mystery that what exactly an application or a process is trying to access on the machine. Even if we know, there comes a question again, what tools should we run to see what is the deviation? So, wouldn’t it be amazing if we can see, visualize and record the system and application activities and see what they are doing in the background? Let’s see them in action with this small session and then you can explore and play around with these super interesting utilities.

Webinar Date & Time:  March 6th 2018, 10 AM GMT

Invite: Download the Calendar Invite

Speaker Bio:

Rajdeep Saxena is part of Developer Tools and work as Support Engineer. Most of the work he does on daily basis revolves around Internet Explorer and Edge. He collaborates proficiently with the different specialties and Product Group to deliver resolution to customers. The kind of role he is in provides him to work on different technologies and tools. Rajdeep is a keen learner and tries to learn and spread awareness about different tools within and across the teams.

Abstract :

This is a memory leak oriented session for Internet explorer and Edge browsers. In this session, we will discuss on various examples to identify the memory leak patterns and how do we resolve them. We will see how to analyze the memory leak using f12 memory profiler and Windows performance analyzer (WPA). This session is aimed to help the developers to detect and resolve the memory leaks in their web applications.

Webinar Date & Time:  March 12th 2018, 10 AM GMT

Invite: Download the Calendar Invite

Speaker Bio:

Prabhu Itagi is part of Developer Browser SDK and works as a Support Engineer in Microsoft. His supports work related to Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer space. His expertise stands on development related issues and helping the customers with regard to application performance and memory leaks. He love to debug the customers complex issues. He has shown great passion in sharing the learning with the customers and colleagues.

To our Azure Relay and Azure Service Bus customers,

Some of you might have seen the below error whenever the Relay and Service Bus service updated its SSL certificate chain.

Unhandled Exception: System.IdentityModel.Tokens.SecurityTokenValidationException: The X.509 certificate CN=servicebus.windows.net is not in the trusted people store. The X.509 certificate CN=servicebus.windows.net chain building failed. The certificate that was used has a trust chain that cannot be verified. Replace the certificate or change the certificateValidationMode. A certificate chain could not be built to a trusted root authority.

What this meant was that you could not obtain the intermediate certificate either because you were in a restrictive environment where access to the intermediate cert URL was blocked or you had some connectivity issues.

We have good news though! We have a fix in Nuget package 4.1.7 which resolves the issue for Relay and Service Bus.

We hope you continue to update to the latest packages as this is a great way to avoid issues from cert changes in the future.

Happy Messaging!

--Relay Out--

Scenario:

You need to allow researchers the flexibility to create storage accounts in Azure but you want to ensure they're using security best practices.  Specifically, you would like to require that secure transfer (HTTPS) be required as they transfer data in & out over the network as well as Server Side Encryption (SSE) be enforced to ensure compliance with encryption at rest requirements.

Components:

Azure Policy is a service in Azure that allows you to create, assign and manage policy definitions against Azure Resource Manager (ARM) resources.  Azure Policy can be used to ensure you stay compliant with your standards and service level agreements.  Policy Definitions can be assigned to subscription level scopes as well as resource group level scopes.  These can be combined together into Policy Initiatives that help meet a compliance standard you would like to enforce.

Solution:

Use built-in and custom Azure Policy definitions to enforce the required practices for any newly created storage accounts in a resource group.

In this scenario, I'm going to create a resource group to ensure that my policy assignments don't have unintended consequences - after all a subscription can be a pretty broad scope and I don't want to impact other admins or resources!  Despite my tendency to be verbose (ask my peers!), I prefer Azure CLI because of its compactness, so that's what I'll use here.

az group create --name policydemo --location EastUS2

We've got a resource group created, now let's validate that we can create a storage account in that resource group without the options that would meet our security requirements (seed the name with some numbers of your own to ensure uniqueness):

az storage account create --name notcompliant3432 --resource-group policydemo --location EastUS

Not ideal - we've confirmed we can create a storage account without any concern for our institution's best practices.  Let's use Azure Policy to fix that!  We'll move over to the portal and take a look at the available policy definitions to see if any might be useful for our scenario.  Click All services in the upper left corner of the portal and scroll on down to the Monitoring + Management section where you'll find Policy:

You'll land at the overview, which will be pretty empty if this is your first foray into Azure Policy.  I'll leave it to the documentation to expand on the various options and elements available, but let's focus on the task at hand.  Look for the Authoring section and click on Assignments:

Let's assign a policy by clicking Assign Policy on the right side of the Policy blade.  This opens up a new blade where we have to select which policy we'd like to apply.  Click the ellipses next to the policy field to see the options.  Scroll down a bit through the available policies and you'll see a built-in policy which looks like it'll address one of our concerns "Require blob encryption for storage accounts":

Let's select that policy and change the tier to Free since we don't need to enforce against existing resources, just newly created ones.  We are forced to specify a scope and it's important to specify both a subscription and a resource group (though resource group is optional) for this exercise as we're learning and don't want to disrupt other deployments as mentioned earlier:

OK, so that takes care of the encryption at rest requirement, but at the time of this blog post, there isn't a built-in policy available to address the secure transport requirement.  Luckily, an example with deployment template is in the documentation here.  Let's deploy that into our subscription so that it appears as a custom policy in our list.  Now we can assign this "require HTTPS traffic only" for blob storage accounts policy:

Now, we'll set the scope and pricing tier as we did with the first policy.  If everything went as planned, we have a pair of policies assigned and scoped to a resource group within your subscription that requires any new storage account to have both encryption at rest and https traffic only enabled. If not the deployment will fail.  Let's test it!

First, we'll try the Azure CLI command we used prior to assigning the policies - remember to change the storage account name.  Last time it deployed a storage account, this time - Doh!

az storage account create --name notcompliant3433 --resource-group policydemo --location EastUS

Resource 'notcompliant3433' was disallowed by policy. Policy identifiers: '[{"policyDefinitionId":"/subscriptions/58556be9-bff6-4b73-98b3-0e064b38ff54/providers/Microsoft.Authorization/policyDefinitions/deacdafe-4560-40a5-8eb7-1fdcadb2601b","policyAssignmentId":"/subscriptions/58556be9-bff6-4b73-98b3-0e064b38ff54/resourceGroups/PolicyDemo/providers/Microsoft.Authorization/policyAssignments/e176a7e03ff44dedb3bb5202"},{"policyDefinitionId":"/providers/Microsoft.Authorization/policyDefinitions/7c5a74bf-ae94-4a74-8fcf-644d1e0e6e6f","policyAssignmentId":"/subscriptions/58556be9-bff6-4b73-98b3-0e064b38ff54/resourceGroups/PolicyDemo/providers/Microsoft.Authorization/policyAssignments/e5fe344d694c4a589a53a40e"}]'.

Excellent!  Even users with fully authorized RBAC roles cannot create non-compliant storage accounts in this resource group.  But what about the folks that do care about security and did read the guidance I sent them?  Let's try again, this time specifying https-only and encryption-services options and see what happens . . .

az storage account create --name compliant3433 --resource-group policydemo --location EastUS2 --https-only true --encryption-services blob

Success!  Now you can go back and check for other interesting policy templates like "Allowed Locations" because a researcher may accidentally deploy a resource in Brazil South region, but that may not meet the research grant's data location requirements.  The documentation does a great job of explaining the differences between RBAC and Azure Policy and offers several examples as well.  My hope is that you'll feel more empowered to allow your customers the flexibility to deploy resources in Azure while maintaining your institution's compliance and governance requirements.

Here in this blog, i will discuss about the experience that i had while using Xamarin UI Test for iOS apps.

What is Xamarin UI Test?

Xamarin UI Test is an automation framework based on Calabash, C# and NUnit. This can be used to automate mobile applications like iOS/Android.

Why?

For an engineer who is comfortable with C#, this is the best framework that can be used to automate the mobile apps developed on hybrid/native apps.

How?

You can go through this link to know more about Xamarin UI Test.

Tips & Tricks!

1. What if your app contains multiple pages!  You can definitely use a page object pattern framework which comes along with the nuget Package. You can find the sample here.
2. Thread.Sleep! Undoubtedly Polling is bad. Xamarin UI Test gives us many methods to stop polling. Here is a sample where the app waits until the button is enabled:

 app.WaitFor(() => app.Query(e => e.Class("UIButton").Index(1)).First().Enabled, "Waiting for Element", timeout: TimeSpan.FromMinutes(3.0)); 
 

      3. Code without Assertions ?? Never! You can use the same assertions that you use for Nunit. Like Assert, StringAssert,FileAssert, CollectionAssert.

      4. How to Identify Elements like datepicker? You can use invoke method on the element

app.Query (x => x.Class ("UIPickerView").Invoke ("selectRow", date.Month - 1 , "inComponent", 0, "animated", true));

      5. How to add test case category ?? Yes, you can! Why would someone add a test category? It not only helps in identifying the test case no. but also when you have a CI pipeline, you can categorize the test methods to run specific tests.

[Category("Test Category Name")]

     6. How to start writing the test? Always open the repl mode and use app.flash to identify the element. After you play with the repl mode, Just type "copy" and paste it in your test method. Remove the unwanted code. "Tree" keyword is used to identify the structure of elements in the UI. And the repl mode is really interactive and supports intellisense.

    7. I am not able to find elements in repl ! If you are trying to use class, sometimes it hardly gives any result.. so try classful ! And there are many implicit methods which works efficiently to capture the element.

8. Can i check the app's memory leak issues? Yes ! you can use backdoor methods in the app to trace the managed and unmanaged memory. For a long running test, this is much helpful. Alternatively you can use Xamarin Profiler too.

9. Automate a webview inside a native app? Some apps use web based login to authenticate the user. We still have the provision to use Webview() to automate those functionalities. It supports Xpath too !

10. I need to create more data and use assertion. Can i use data driven test ? Yes definitely, CSV or Xml or JSon.

11. I want to run my UI Test in my device along with my regular builds. Is it possible ? Yes we can use cake addins to perform CI integration. Alternatively you can use app center to have e2e mobile app dev/test/deploy.

Common Troubleshooting with iOS apps

1. Unable to contact test backend running in app. A common cause is that the app is not properly linked - You need to check the Xamarin.TestCloud.Agent (to be latest based on the Xcode) or Xamarin.Calabash component is missing from the appdelegate.cs.
2. I upgraded all the packages but my test is not running ! You should use NUnit Version below 3.0.0, ideally to use 2.6.4 unless there is any update. Sometimes Xamarin UI Tests doesn't work well with iOS upgrades. So wait for sometime until the Xcode/Xamarin support is provided.
3. I am not able to deploy the device agent. Check the version of Xamarin.TestCloud.Agent, Xamarin.UITest. If there was an iOS update, the Xcode needs to be updated (if not available use the preview version).
4. System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException - Sometimes you get this error in repl mode. Try reconnecting the device and run the repl again.
5.  Not able to see the tests. This is a common issue which we observe in visual studio for mac. You can rebuild the solution, Quit Visual Studio (Command+Q) and then re-open to view the tests.

Please feel free to post any queries below !

以 SQL Server Agent 為例, 服務名稱可以自行替換

Option Explicit
Dim objWMIService, objService, strComputer,strService
strService="SQLSERVERAGENT"
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\" & strComputer & "rootcimv2")
For Each objService In objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_Service Where Name = '"_
&strService&"'")
If objService.State <> "Running" Then
objService.StartService
End If
Next
WScript.Quit

Enjoy. Jacky

[原文发表地址] Visual Studio Code C/C++ extension Jan 2018 update

[原文发表时间] 2018/1/17

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[原文发表地址] Visual Studio Code C/C++ extension Feb 2018 update

[原文发表时间] 2018/2/20

This overview combines information from different TechNet/Blog/Support pages to have the most interesting values in one table. I will maintain this page from time to time. However, it could happen that some values are outdated. If so, please leave a comment and I will update the table.

Note, that dates are specified in German notation (dd.mm.yyyy).

Most columns don't need to be explained. The Channel Switch column, which appears twice, specifies the version and the date of the CBB/SAC declaration for each release. Further information on servicing channels can be found here.

Always check the last modified date.

For further information on the values mentioned in the table, please visit following sites:
Windows 10 release information
Windows lifecycle fact sheet
Windows 10 Insider previews
Windows 10 servicing extensions


Last modified on February 24, 2018

In this post, Principal Consutant/App Dev Manager Lou Sawyer describes how to integrate webhooks and runbooks to cleanup failed Azure deployments.

Release Management capabilities in Visual Studio Team Service are fantastic and offers extensibility points to make everyone's life easier. In this post, we'll be discussing the Service Hooks feature along with a potential use case integrating with a Runbook.

As detailed in Integrate with service hooks, Service Hooks allow you to perform tasks in other services in response to events in VSTS. This capability can be used to start a runbook from a webhook (runbooks and use cases are covered in Azure Automation User Documentation) to perform conditional tasks after a VSTS Release.

One common use of Release Deployments is to perform testing that can involve a significant number of resources in Azure to complete. By default, when a deployment fails in VSTS, it stops the deployment at that time and does not continue in order to give you a chance to investigate the failure.  This can lead to resources continuing to be available longer than needed adding cost to the environment. The option does exist to configure to continue on error, however this is not conditional and may result in more task failure (or the environment being deleted when you would want to investigate). In such a scenario, use a webhook to starts a runbook on deployment failure to examine which task failed and clean-up the environment.

Consider the image shown below, in this case there are intermittent failures and this release creates resources in a resource group in Azure. Depending on when it fails, these resources may result in unwanted overhead.

To mitigate this scenario, consider using a runbook. The image below shows a PowerShell Workflow runbook being created to handle a failed release event

The workflow needs to take one parameter named webhookData which will contain the body of the post request from VSTS.  The request body of webhookData then needs to be deserialized so we can examine the release details.  In the code below, we are walking through the environment deployment phase tasks to find the first task where we know the resourceGroupName and location are used as parameters.  We can use these values to test if the resourceGroupName exists at the specified location and remove it; a more elaborate script would iterate through all the tasks to find where it failed and then decide to remove the resource group or not.

The next step is to create a webhook for the runbook. This is covered fairly well in Starting an Azure Automation runbook with a webhook. As a word of caution, the URL for the webhook cannot be retrieved after creation, so save it before you click Create!

At this point, we need to create the Service Hook in VSTS. This can be done from a Service Hooks settings as shown below

From the Service Hooks pane, you have the option to create a subscription, choose it to create a Service hook.

There are lots of services you can send events to, in this case we are interested in Web hooks; this topic is covered in VSTS documentation on Web Hooks.

The trigger options can be narrowed to a specific release, environment, and status.  In this case, we are interested in failed deployments to UAT for TailSpin Toys as shown below.

The next window allows you to paste the URI generated when you created the webhook for your runbook automation.  There are a lot of options for message detail and it’s important to note that the highest level of detail (All) is the default. This option contains a lot of information about your release so it's important to use secure connections.  In this case, we need the full release details to pull out specific information from the tasks and any conditional work we want to do.

Finally, the service hook is done and the runbook is ready.  The next time a deployment fails, you should see an output in your runbook jobs like the screen below. As the snapshot shows, the failed deployment resource groups were found and removed.

There is a lot of power and flexibility in the Service Hooks feature in VSTS.  Hopefully this gives some additional ideas on how to do conditional processing on a release that needs attention.

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